Finally in compliance: Harris County Jail passes state inspection for first time in 2 years

For the first time in nearly two years, the Harris County Jail is in compliance with Texas’ minimum safety standards, a significant achievement for the long-troubled facility.

The jail, operated by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, last week received a certificate of compliance from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards after passing a four-day inspection.

The Harris County Jail had been considered out of compliance with Texas’ minimum safety standards since September 2022, when an inspection found dozens of incarcerated people waiting to be processed in holding cells for more than 48 hours, a violation of state law. Follow-up inspections identified staffing shortages, failures to provide medical care and lax monitoring of a person who died in the jail.

To address these problems, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office hired dozens of people and sent hundreds of people held in jail while awaiting trial from the overcrowded downtown facility to other jails. The recent actions by the sheriff’s office have come at a significant cost to taxpayers, however, including up to $50 million to send people to jails run by other agencies.

The compliance certificate represents a noteworthy development for the jail, which for years has faced accusations of mismanagement and overcrowding made worse by a backlog of cases in the Harris County criminal court system.

“While earning a passing mark from the state is an important achievement, it has never been our ultimate goal,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a statement. “What matters more is knowing that we are doing everything in our power to make the jail safe and secure for the thousands of people in our custody and for everyone who works within the jail’s walls.”

While they gave the Harris County Jail a passing grade, state inspectors provided “technical assistance” on four fronts.

During the inspection, conducted from Aug. 12 to 15, inspectors found that the sheriff’s office had wrongly included detention officers who responded to emergencies and transported incarcerated people to court hearings in the state-mandated staffing ratio of one detention officer for every 48 incarcerated people.

The inspectors also found two fire alarm control panels needed replacing and jail staff were late to 15 routine checks on inmates, though that number constituted less than 1 percent of the 15,668 rounds the inspectors reviewed.

“Failure to address the technical assistance areas in a timely manner may result in the issuance of a notice of non-compliance,” inspectors wrote in a report.

Big strides or barely better?

As of Monday, there were 9,350 inmates in the Harris County Jail, as well as more than 1,300 housed in facilities near Lubbock, central Louisiana and northwest Mississippi, according to the county’s data dashboard . The Harris County Jail facilities are designed to hold up to about 9,400 inmates.

Phillip Bosquez, assistant chief of detentions command at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office,said earlier this month during a jail commission meeting that the number of detention officer openings had declined from 180 to 139 over the past three months. He credited a 12 percent pay increase approved by Harris County Commissioners last year for helping to attract new hires.

The improvements have coincided with a decline in jail deaths this year. Seven inmates have died so far in 2024, most recently a 49-year-old man on Monday. The jail’s sixth in-custody death came on Aug. 12. In comparison, there were 19 inmate deaths in 2023 and 27 in 2022.

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“There is plenty of evidence showing we’ve achieved great strides toward meeting this higher standard,” Gonzalez said in his statement. “For the second year in a row, we are seeing a significant decline in the mortality rate among the people housed in our jail. We’ve also seen an uptick in our detention officer retention rate, which is a sign that work conditions are improving.”

Krish Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit that advocates for people in county jails, said in a statement that she found the timing of the compliance certificate and the recent custodial deaths as ironic.

Gundu also said she found it “deeply troubling” that jail commission inspectors provided technical assistance to the sheriff’s office during the August jail inspection, and that the agency is “still barely meeting” required staff-to-inmate ratios.